Slant - 2017-06-08

• About 40 marchers showed up on Friday, June 2, to protest the downtown Eugene dog ban. It’s interesting that the city decided to wait on banning alcohol in all parks due to “mixed” reviews in public comment, but the City Council charged ahead with banning pups, despite decidedly mixed reviews. Were there more people with money and influence wanting to sip wine or toss back a hoppy beer in the park than there were who stroll with their dogs downtown? For the record, we are pro-dog and pro- a responsible drink in the park once in a while. We are anti targeting the homeless with awkward bans clearly aimed at driving the unhoused where they can’t be seen, but not helping them.

• This is the anniversary of the Summer of Love (See this week’s cover feature). Why don’t we add a renaming party to all the fun activities the city is planning for downtown Eugene this summer? Make Kesey Square Kesey Square again! Some elements of this town tried to run away from that name, going instead to the officially boring Broadway Plaza, but the City Council has reaffirmed the tribute to the great writer Ken Kesey. Time to celebrate those things that make us different from Everytown, U.S.A.

• Remember this name. Hope Hicks. She’s a young staffer down the food chain on Donald Trump’s communications team. She was part of the Trump meeting with the pope at the Vatican, while Sean Spicer, a Catholic, was not. In response to a report by The Washington Post detailing Trump’s tendency to be demeaning and rude to his staff, Hicks issued a statement full of exaggerated compliments: Trump has a “magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him,” as well as “an unparalleled ability to communicate with people.” Watch Hope Hicks.

• What We’re Reading: We haven’t opened this one yet but two of our smartest reading friends have recommended it. Dream Hoarders:How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, said to be powerful in its look at the upper middle educated class in America.

• Ashland actor Denis Arndt, who put in 15 seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s and ’80s, is up for a Tony Award for his lead performance in Simon Stephens’s comedy Heisenberg. Arndt came out of retirement for the play, which ran on Broadway for two months last fall at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. He played against Mary-Louise Parker (Fried Green Tomatoes, The West Wing, Weeds), who inexplicably kisses him on the neck when she encounters him in a train station to open the show. Not too bad for a guy who turned 78 in February.